Mike Kelley
Fortress of Solitude

In fact, fragments of his old home, known as Kryptonite, would reduce him to a level of childlike helplessness. In Superman’s world, home was a killer. The Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) spent his entire career trying to get home. Like Superman, however, he came to realize that it was an impossible quest.

Looking at the play between memory and forgetfulness the exhibition brought together a range of key works from across the artist’s career in order to reflect on the uncanny condition of psychological homelessness in the contemporary world. Raised in suburban Detroit, Kelley gravitated to the counter-cultural beat of punk rock and the underground art scene. He became an important part of a new generation of American artist in the late 1970s that approached the stultifying effects of normative American popular culture with a skeptical eye and happily combined sculpture, painting, drawing, video and performance without respect to any kind of artistic hierarchy.

Everything was possible and anything could be used in order to investigate the repressed dark underbelly of the seemingly calm veneer of so-called normal American middleclass life. Whether using found stuffed animals as emotional effigies of long lost traumatic memories of childhood or evoking the psychic existential homelessness of Superman in the form of Kelley’s exploration of the superhero’s shrunken and inaccessible home city of Kandor that he kept in his Fortress of Solitude, Kelley sought to continually remind us that no matter how hard we try, we can’t go home.